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Knots in Washington XVIII; Khovanov homology
May 28-30, 2004
George Washington University
Washington, DC, USA

Organizers
Jozef H. Przytycki (GWU), Yongwu Rong (GWU)

Conference Homepage


Spanning trees and Khovanov homology
by
Ilya Kofman
Columbia University
Coauthors: Abhijit Champanerkar, Oleg Viro

Thistlethwaite showed that the Jones polynomial is a state sum over spanning trees of the Tait graph, obtained by checkerboard coloring a knot diagram. We show that there exists a complex generated by these spanning trees whose homology is the reduced Khovanov homology. In fact, the spanning tree complex is a deformation retract of Khovanov's complex. For alternating knots, this complex is the simplest possible because all boundary maps are zero.

This is work in progress, joint with Abhijit Champanerkar and Oleg Viro.

Date received: May 25, 2004


Copyright © 2004 by the author(s). The author(s) of this work and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Topology Atlas. Document # canv-19.